


Sparrow Catcher

by Beldam



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Enemies to Lovers, M/M, Slow Burn, or something like that, reverse au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-10
Updated: 2017-11-10
Packaged: 2019-01-31 10:10:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12679737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beldam/pseuds/Beldam
Summary: When the spiritual leader of a burgeoning omnic supremacist movement, Tekhartha Zenyatta, inadvertently draws the ire of yakuza leader Shimada Genji, it's clear he has to do something about it, one way or another. But when it becomes apparent that it would be a waste to kill him, he comes to a simple conclusion: he will just have to catch him instead.(Takes place in the reverse au, and recounts the events leading up to Genji and Zenyatta's 'partnership')





	Sparrow Catcher

**Author's Note:**

> I've been sitting on this, and the idea of it, for what feels like 10,000 years now, so I feel I have an obligation to post it no matter where or how it winds up haha. Hope you all enjoy!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A brief encounter.

The first time Zenyatta steps foot in Japan, it is on a pilgrimage with the Shambali.

Despite the fact his brothers and sisters frame it as a religious expedition, the truth is their visit is little more than a matter of politics. Japan, which recovered well in the aftermath of the Crisis and has long held the belief that one does not have to be human to have a soul, could not offer a more fertile ground to sow the seeds of the Shambali’s message. As for Zenyatta, he’s never had much of a stomach for proselytizing. And if he did, the Shambali creed, full of dogma and succor, is not the one he’d spread.

It’s a wonder, even now, that Mondatta managed to strongarm him into coming along, insisting that the trip is “for his own spiritual betterment.” Meaning: he thinks the discontent that has plagued Zenyatta these last few months is a momentary trouble that will pass, if only he puts his mind to other things. He does not (cannot) know how wrong he is: what will happen in the future, in the months and years to come. Cannot know of the distance that will amass between them like rising dunes, that will excise them from each other permanently, like meat off bone. He cannot know (as Zenyatta already knows) that there will be no fixing this. Never ever ever. No matter what he might do.  

So, they arrive, and they go to press conferences and confer with politicians, and attend rituals and sacred sites and demonstrate their own esoteric practices, moving from city to city to city, giving themselves hardly a moment to rest, all for the barest possibility that the humans that flock to see them might come to think of them as people. Zenyatta is present for all this, but his thoughts are elsewhere. He speaks only when spoken to. He only deigns to keep up conversation for more than a few minutes at a time. His demeanor is chilly and closed-off, and soon enough, people know to steer clear of him, preferring the company of his far more welcoming siblings, who turn their heads to him, sometimes worried but mostly frustrated as the days go on.

By the time they have reached Hanamura, the final stop on their overly long trip, Zenyatta is quite done with the entirety of the endeavor, and he suspects the others are entirely done with him. Not that he has any intent to correct his behaviour. He might be mollified if only he could sneak away to do _real_ work, to actually _help_ the omnics his brothers and sisters say they speak for, but by this late stage, Mondatta is wise to all his tricks. He goes nowhere, save the places listed on their itinerary--and to the koi pond nested in the center of their hotel’s lavish atrium, when he is finally, mercifully alone.

“For goodness’ sake, Zenyatta. You must try not to look so sullen.”

Zenyatta shifts minutely where he is levitating cross legged over the center of the pond, ripples propagating beneath him in steady intervals, sent rolling by the gentle force of his hovertech. The koi glide sluggishly through the water beneath, accustomed enough to his presence that they no longer roil under him like beggars grappling for a tossed penny.

He keeps his head down and his array stubbornly off. He refuses to give Mondatta the satisfaction of his full attention.

“ _You_ must try not to look so sullen,” he responds childishly, provoking a weak sigh from his brother. 

“Zenyatta…” The voice is pleading enough that Zenyatta allows the far left column of his array to flicker on, the omnic equivalent of cracking one eye open to glare. On the edge of the pond, Mondatta looks back at him, hands folded carefully at the front of his body, posture neat but formidably unhappy. “You understand that it makes the other patrons nervous to see you lingering here at all hours of the day,” he says, low and chiding. “Are our accommodations truly so offensive to you that you cannot at least mope in the privacy of our own room? We will only be here for another ten days. Surely you can stomach it a little while longer.”

As a point of fact, he cannot. Their suite is much too large and extravagant for Zenyatta’s tastes, comfortably fitting all 8 of the visiting omnics with room and resources to spare. He feels foolish there, tacky and tasteless. He supposes Mondatta cannot sympathize. Pristine as always in gold and white, bearing not a single knick or scrape, his brother is suited to the place--though Zenyatta hopes dearly that it is not a point of pride.  

Instead of saying all this, he simply asks, “To what end? Those who claim to speak on behalf of the people have no right to live like this. We should be in a halfway house. The street. Even a closet would be better than a place like this. I just cannot understand how you can be so comfortable with this…” He opens his hand speechlessly, indicating everything in line of sight, the pond and atrium, the spiral staircase and its gilded handrails leading to the upper floors, the bellhops in their crisp white uniforms, double breasted like military garb. Zenyatta shakes his head. “This _extravagance_.”

“Our hosts were generous enough to offer these lodgings,” Mondatta says mildly. “It would be rude to refuse them.”

Mention of their illustrious benefactors only rankles Zenyatta further. The Shimada family, the sovereigns of Hanamura and its enveloping city, sitting atop a throne assembled from meat and bones. Despite inviting the Shambali into their town and giving them a place to stay, they have been noticeably scarce during the visit. The closest they’ve come to seeing any of the family’s members was when the elder heir met them briefly upon their arrival, keeping the pleasantries tactlessly short as he evaluated them with severe dark eyes. It is well known that the Shimada-gumi, with their ancient ways, have little tolerance for omnics--but, they are bound by the shackles of convention. A shared connection (a patron of the Shambali’s and business partner of the Shimadas’) had made a big to-do about how good a fit the two were for one another, and after what Zenyatta imagined must have been countless oblique rejections, the family had eventually folded and proffered an invitation on their own steam. Apparently it was only natural to be prejudiced, but completely unfathomable to be impolite.  

Zenyatta knows it is futile to point out the iniquity of accepting the kindness of a group that despises omnickind while happily butchering their own. But there is so much wrong with what they are doing that he is happy to broach the topic from another angle.

“Does avoiding what is rude trump doing what is right?” A guest comes in from the gleaming revolving doors behind Mondatta, and they stare openly at the two omnics all the way from the entryway to the elevators on the opposite end of the lobby--at least until Zenyatta’s mala give an annoyed chime, and they trip hurriedly between the parting elevator doors with their head down. “How can you justify the trouble? The expense? The distance? We are so far from the worst of it here, in this ivory tower. How can someone hope to grow a garden when they refuse to touch the dirt?”

Something like exasperation muddles Mondatta’s aura, but his physical demeanor is beyond reproach. Zenyatta wonders how much of his politicking has gone to his head--how much of their conversations are framed in his mind not as dialogues, but as negotiations.

“You know it is not so simple,” he says. “We are given the freedom that we are precisely because people regard us with a certain amount of mystique. I am not saying it is ideal, but sometimes to be permitted to do what is right, one must first put up with doing that which is merely palatable.”

Zenyatta balks at every part of the statement. “I have no interest in being _palatable_ \--”

“You should,” Mondatta says, very quietly. “What humans do not swallow, they spit out.”

His words echo with the low roar of experience. Mondatta so rarely speaks of any time before the Shambali, before the fateful meeting of the stray omnics that would become his brothers and sisters, but in spite of his affection for humans, his desire to learn from them and to teach them, to be seen as equal to them, he too has been a victim of theirs, been used as a toy and a tool, a thing to be broken and thrown out.  

Righteous fury thunders at Zenyatta’s core. _How dare they,_ his mind howls helplessly. _And how dare he. How dare he_ **_let_ ** _them. How dare he trust them to change when they won’t. How dare he give them any more power to hurt him._

Bitterly, Zenyatta mutters, “Better that, than to become their feed.” He expects Mondatta to playfully scold him, as he has in the past--using his desire to protect their their brotherhood and their family to brush away the fact that Zenyatta means every word he says.

Instead, the elder omnic moves towards Zenyatta. The hem of his kasaya floats around his shins as steps into the pond, advancing with such patience that he barely disturbs the water. When he is near enough, he places his hands on his brother’s shoulders and pulls him down until their gaze is level. Reluctantly, Zenyatta allows his hovertech to disengage and the rest of his array to flicker on. He lowers his feet into the water, one after the other. The koi scatter, and then gingerly return, sinking down to kiss and burble around their ankles.

“I know you must feel the state of things much more keenly than I do,” Mondatta says slowly. “Your compassion is so much greater than mine, than any of our brothers and sisters, so I know your suffering must be too. Seeing the way our people struggle, it makes you tired, I know. But mankind is not our enemy. Just look around, Zenyatta. The world is changing at its pace, but it _is_ changing.”

“That very well may be--but I am afraid the world’s pace is a bit too slow for my liking.”

Mondatta gives a soft laugh. “You have never been very patient,” he acknowledges, “but give them time and you will see. In the end, all will become as it was meant to be.”

When Zenyatta does not speak, Mondatta seems to regard his silence as consideration--or worse, compliance. Slowly, he unclasps his hands from his brother and begins to retreat back to the edge of the pond.

“Come up, when you feel you’re able,” he says, wiping his feet dry with the fabric of his own robe out of consideration for the hotel staff’s time and the other guests’ safety. When he is done, much of the lower half of his kasaya has been stained a pleasant mossy green. “Your brothers and sisters will be waiting for you.” As he’s about to depart he stops briefly. He turns his head slightly to look over his shoulder. “By the way, Zenyatta,” he hums. “Have you touched the Iris since we’ve been here?”

Zenyatta scoffs openly. “Do you think I’ve been able to manage such peace of mind?”

 _“_ Try,” Mondatta says, with a turn of his head that gives the impression of someone rolling their eyes. “I suspect it will be of some interest to you.”

“How do you mean?”

A smile in his voice now, the slightest hint of amusement. “What did I just tell you about patience?”

\--

That night, when he has returned to his resting siblings in the suite, Zenyatta does as his brother suggests, and presses into the Iris’s warm embrace. It is a struggle, as he thought it would be. His restiveness has harried his connection with it, and keeping the golden thread that unspools in his unconsciousness from snapping with his own worries and doubts takes some effort. But finally, he is able to grasp it, to let it spin and tighten over him, soft and bright as a moth’s silken cocoon.

At first, everything is as it always is. The Iris’s sky and sea and shore are all an identical gilded hue, creating a land of simultaneous sunset and sunrise. In it, he sees his brothers and sisters as stippled points of light, made shapeless by the distance that separates them. Faint glimmers like grated filigree shudder in the air, moving around Zenyatta as well as through him--the pulse of existence, all the souls that throb upon the Earth but have never known firsthand the power that is the heart of their being. Above, lights from Elsewhere spin and shine, perhaps beings from other realities and other worlds. Wondrous as it is, as it always is, he cannot discern anything “odd” about it.

That is, until he sees the beast.

At first, it’s nothing but a shimmer for off the lip of the shore; light buried within an even greater light. As it undulates towards the shallows, however, it takes on colour and mass until it is an immense chartreuse body, long and narrow and twinkling. The milky way given flesh, its countless swirling stars rendered in emerald and jade.

Questions of what it is and where it came from evade Zenyatta. Something seizes him at the sight of it, an unfamiliar possessiveness that smothers suspicion, the desire to capture the being the way a child might uncoordinatedly snatch at the light of stars.

The omnic moves to meet it, going deeper and deeper into the sunken glow until light buoys the hem of his kasaya and laps against his hips. He reaches down and slips his fingers into the Iris’s liquid body, and the mysterious creature draws near, investigating him. He senses it take note of his extended hand and delight arrests him when its body rolls once over itself, and then it turns up and rises to meet his touch.

To his surprise, there is nothing ethereal about it--its body is solid and covered in smooth scales like a koi, and it is hot, impossibly hot, although touching it does not burn. The light should be too shallow to fit it here, but it twists languorously around Zenyatta, never breaching the surface and changing shape to fit, shrinking and expanding at a whim. Zenyatta can see its eyes watching him, pockets of blinding white in a ferocious, animalistic face.

 _Yet so gentle_ , he thinks as it presses its head into his hand and allows his fingers to comb through its rough, wild mane. He wonders where it came from. No matter how many times he has looked into the Iris, he has never encountered anything like it. But, he reasons, if he stands on this shore, it is only natural that there are things that would originate from the other side--and, just as likely, there are things that come from neither Here nor There, eternal things born in the deepest parts of the Iris, a cluster of existence that was never meant to go aground.

In the nights that follow, searching the creature out becomes a welcome reprieve from the trials of the day. Most evenings, it is there, curious and eager, meeting Zenyatta on the golden shore. Sometimes, he feels against his soul its teeth. Its claws. It coils around his limbs, and he feels it trying to tug him further in, to take him Over There. He can feel _want_ inside it, an infectious desire that seems to come from within himself, that makes him want to bend to its will, to takes its whims as his own.  

But he resists. Somehow, he resists.

On occasion, Zenyatta sees three more serpentine bodies twisting in the ambrosia surf, though unlike his juniper beast they never draw near. Still, he is able to make them out with time.

The first two are identical, elegant and sleek, coloured the clear, bright blue of a seashell’s whorls. The third is massive, a leviathan, its body glowing like fire in a flask. It is bright, too bright--like a superheated object the instant before it explodes. Zenyatta finds he must avert his gaze from it; when he looks at it too long, his soul is seized by a vast, barbed sorrow.

The true nature of the creatures still eludes him by the time the final day of their trip has rolled around.

That morning, he wakes early, only to find he is alone in the suite, and that the door is cracked open. Outside, he can hear restless chatter--not from his brothers and sisters alone, but from countless others. Discord ebbs steadily in through the space in the doorway, oozes unbidden from the walls.

Zenyatta’s orbs rise around his shoulders, rotate unsteadily before returning to rest. He stands and leaves the suite.

Just beyond the door, his siblings stand clustered tightly around each other. The hotel is designed so that all the rooms overlook the atrium, and they are all staring over the railing, into the lobby below. Other guests do the same on either side of them, and on multiple other floors, utterly rapt. Zenyatta can hear the hiss and pop of radio static cutting in and out. Blue and red lights blink on the glass and gilt all around the lobby, leaking in through the revolving doors, where an ambulance and police cars idle under the porte-cochère. Directly beneath them, cops move back and forth, ferrying police tape and notepads this way and that, a few off to the sides, speaking to blanched and shaking staff. As he moves to join his siblings, Zenyatta hears clips of speech from all around, exchanged in hasty, secret tones between the guests.

_What happened?_

_Someone was murdered._

_Yakuza ties,_ they whisper amongst themselves. _A deal gone wrong._

“Awful,” Mondatta says beneath his breath, keeping his gaze respectfully lowered as a cluster of paramedics exit the hotel pushing a gurney and an occupied body bag.

The sight of the corpse being wheeled away sends a second wave of discord rolling through the atrium--and with it, more disconcertingly, a strange, not-unpleasant jolt. The perverse thrill of seeing something that should be forbidden. One of their own dead, and of all things it is excitement that floods these people’s hearts.

 _Awful,_ Zenyatta echoes Mondatta in his thoughts, optics scanning over the crowded faces one by one, picking out the horror and disgust and the thrill that blinks behind their eyes. He pulls back, moves to retreat into the room so he can be away from it all, but does not get far before another form forces its way past him.

He turns, surprised, and catches a glimpse of the young woman who pushed him, her wild hair, her too big clothes, the ruined dress tucked under her arm--and the man she’s dragging along with her, the strands of bright hair that lick out from beneath the brim of his baseball cap: green, but black at the roots, like phosphorus burning over coal.  

The woman says nothing to Zenyatta. If she knows she shoved him, she isn’t in any mind to care. She and her apparent beau just race past, laughing and whispering giddily, paying no respect to the mood of the space, the death that rankles the air of the lobby. But as they step into the elevator at the end of the hall, immediately upon each other in the tight space, touching, stroking, lips against skin, the man briefly looks up, catching Zenyatta’s gaze--and he smiles.

It’s blithe, almost childish, bending the dappled bruising on the corner of his lip, making his dark eyes shine. “Sorry,” he mouths in the manner of a man who has never been sorry for anything in his life. His shoulders rise with laughter when Zenyatta responds by staring coolly on. He’s still laughing as he closes his eyes, slowly dips his head to catch his lover’s mouth with his, his long eyelashes sending shadows like tear tracks down his pale cheeks--and then the elevator doors close, and he’s gone.

Zenyatta doesn’t move for a bit. He watches the numbers above the elevator light up, marking its path towards the upper floors. He tries to remember what he was doing, but finds he can’t recall.

His palm burns with the memory of the heat of the beast in the Iris. He closes his hand around it, and it disappears. 


End file.
